A cluster-based approach to thesaurus construction

The importance of a thesaurus in the successful operation of an information retrieval system is well recognized. Yet techniques which support the automatic generation of thesauri remain largely undiscovered. This paper describes one approach to the automatic generation of global thesauri, based on the discrimination value model of Salton, Yang, and Yu and on an appropriate clustering algorithm. This method has been implemented and applied to two document collections. Preliminary results indicate that this method, which produces improvements in retrieval performance in excess of 10 and 15 percent in the test collections, is viable and worthy of continued investigation.